The Gmail team at Google puts in a lot of effort to make sure messages are delivered as soon as you hit "send" -- now, the team has launched another way to an email "through SMS." Google created "Gmail SMS," a new service currenlty available in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya -- let you send and […]

The Gmail team at Google puts in a lot of effort to make sure messages are delivered as soon as you hit "send" -- now, the team has launched another way to an email "through SMS."

Google created "Gmail SMS," a new service currenlty available in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya -- let you send and receive emails as SMS messages using your mobile phone.

Gmail SMS works on any phone (even the most basic ones which only support voice and SMS), regardless of whether or not your phone has an internet connection. "It automatically forwards your emails as SMS text messages to your phone and you can respond by replying directly to the SMS," explains Google.

"You can control the emails received by replying with commands such as MORE, PAUSE and RESUME. Additionally, compose a new email as an SMS and send to any email address recipient - who will find your message in the right email conversation thread!"

Google has now made available its "interactive weather widget" on tablets!. The interactive weather visualization was until now available on Google when searching on your mobile phone.

Now, "when you type [weather] into Google on your tablet, you'll see the current weather and you can scroll through the hourly and ten-day forecast. You can also toggle the Precipitation and Wind buttons to check out the percent chance of precipitation and wind direction/speed, respectively," google posted.

Google quitely acquired part of the design team "Cuban Council," according to a note on companies blog. Google has also confirmed the mini-acquisition stating:

"We're very excited to share that some folks on our team will be joining Google to focus on design aspects of Google+," reads the Cuban Council blog, titled "A New Voyage," "Having worked closely with a variety of Google product teams since 2005, we're thrilled to have the opportunity to focus our creative efforts within the organization."

Finally, Zoho Office, is now be integrated into Google Drive through a Google Chrome extensions.

Zoho, however, is positioning the new Google Drive integration as a challenge to Microsoft, and it also targets the corporate and enterprise market with its products. But Google is making its own inroads into these areas, according to Google's "4 million businesses now use Google Apps, in addition to 40 million active users." Zoho's business install base is much smaller than 6+ million users.

Zoho is a suite of online applications targeted at small and medium sized businesses and currently avilable over 25 online services.

The Zoho Office integration with Google Drive.

Requirements:

Create a new Zoho document from Google Drive's UI

Edit an existing document in Google Drive using Zoho's editor

Import a Google document into Zoho Office's UI

Collaborate in real time on the same document from Google Drive in ZOffice's editor.

In addtion, Zoho also enabled "SSO to login into Zoho with Google accounts without having to provide any extra information."

How the integration works?

"Users can create a new document from Google Drive's UI or edit their existing Google Drive documents with Zoho's editors. And when the user hits save, the modified document will be saved in Google Drive as a new document, thereby leaving the original Document untouched. This new document comes with extensions recognized by Zoho's apps. For example, a text document, Test.doc, from Google drive, when edited in Zoho Writer and saved, will be saved as Test.zdoc in Google Drive," explains the team.

Users can invite their Google contacts to collaborate on their Google Drive documents and edit them using Zoho editors.

To use the new Google Drive integration, users can download the following extensions: Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show for the Chrome Web Store.

Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.